DRONE by Nick Hahn (due 2017)

 

“A drone is often preferred for missions that are too “dull, dirty, or dangerous” for manned aircraft.”

 

PROLOGUE

Her name was Cosita. She was eighteen looked like fourteen thought like 22. One of nine children from El Chorillo, a poverty-stricken, dangerous barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets of El Chorillo six months earlier. He was nine and beautiful.

Cosita completed high school at the top of her class, spoke fluent English and Spanish with a graduate degree  earned on the streets of El Chorillo. There she was known as jefe mujer, (boss woman).

In the developed world she would have been a CEO, respected by her peers and feared by her competitors.

Interpol, the world’s largest international police organization, recruited Cosita . She was smart, street savvy, motivated and pretty; the perfect candidate for Interpol and their undercover investigation of human trafficking.

Cosita would be a Drone.

There are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in human history, an estimated 27 million in bondage across the globe. Men, women, and children being exploited for manual and sexual labor against their will.

                                            ****

The graffiti was Spanish, neon colors highlighting varicose cracks covering the wall, like an alcoholic’s nose. The building smelled of urine and pot; there was a metal door with four bolt locks and a dirty sign:

KEEP OUT-PRIVATE PROPERTY-TRESPASSERS ARE PROSECUTED.

Was as a nine-year-old boy, the victim of sex traffickers  a trespasser?

The windows had frosted glass embedded with chicken wire; they swung out and up like fake eyelashes supported by notched adjustment bars.

This factory building was on the near-west side of Cleveland, an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River, known as The Flats. This building had a pedigree, a sweatshop garment factory, a warehouse for imported cheese, and a crack den for teenage potheads.

It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with a film studio, a training facility and a dormitory fit for the Ivy League.

Slim’s girls came from nothing, life in his building was an improvement.  Slim understood this, he knew about poverty, cold and hunger. The West side of Chicago was his training ground. He was now a successful entrepreneur, business was good and he intended to make it better.

He weighed 140 pounds soaking wet, no one knew what held his pants up, he would only jsay “it’s magic”, the name stuck.

 

CHAPTER ONE